A Witness Sees History Restaged And Rewritten.

WHAT'S it like to watch your own experience turn up as grand opera: in my case, finding my reporting about Nixon in China suddenly evoked by the Metropolitan Opera's production of John Adams's ''Nixon in China''? Very weird. I kept imagining myself onstage in the prepositioned press crowd as Air Force One dropped from the sky in Beijing. And there I was again among the toasters clinking glasses that night at Chou En-lai's banquet for the president. Weirder still was my realization that one of the main characters in the opera was still living -- and surely sulking -- just a mile across town. That's because the Henry A. Kissinger I know from years of professional contact is just a wee bit more fascinating and complicated than the lecherous lackey of landlords who drags his namesake through the muck in the Met's drama. He sings: [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]